I don’t want to have a public debate on the specifics of this case, but I think it’s useful for posterity to note the following:
1. The organizing team was willing to pay for rental car transportation if more than one person wanted to go.
2. We did not have reason to believe this was the case in the run-up to the retreat.
3. Communication with university groups was broadly not as good as it could have been, and this is something we will look to improve on for future retreats.
Sorry, I probably should’ve included this in the post. The groups were UChicago, Purdue, UIUC, Wisconsin, WashU, Northwestern, amd Indiana. There was also a student from UC Berkeley and a student from Yale.
My understanding is that they were trying to sell in a hurry, and the number of buyers for properties like these is very small. Ironically, if they weren’t so desperate to rid themselves of the negative PR around having spent lots of money on a “castle”, they could have saved a great deal of money by waiting to sell it.
Edit: The last sentence is missing some qualifiers, but I think the broader point about PR skittishness and impatience leading to negative outcomes is correct, even if the monetary loss caused by this in particular is uncertain or even zero.
I mostly think about EA PR downstream of Forum posts, and this post is mostly reacting to the comments I’ve seen on EA Forum relating to EA PR.
I assume it’s much easier for people to choose to not post or comment than choose to not think about something entirely. Trying to avoid thinking about something at all seems unhealthy, but so do some of the thinking patterns you can engage in here. The wording I use is “decide to care less”, which feels right to me.